How life responds to chemical threats

Vaccines save lives

I had wondered what ever happened to Trump’s so-called Commission on Vaccine Safety, proposed last year around this time. Fortunately the commission which seemed geared up to call vaccine safety into question (headed as it would have been by vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr,) seems to have stalled out. Hopefully it’ll stay that way. But he’s not the only well-known skeptic. I love Oprah, and really liked her Golden Globes speech, but she’s got her flaws, and supporting vaccine skeptics like Jenny McCarthy is one of them as discussed here in Mother Jones.

I’ve been writing about vaccines for a few years in different contexts. Below is an excerpt from Natural Defense. The book is about how we can reduce our dependence on drugs and chemicals like pesticides, by relying on natural allies. One of those allies is our own immune response, this excerpt from a chapter about tech advances in vaccine development includes a bit about Maurice Hilleman, the virologist who developed the vaccine anti-vaxxers love to hate (along with many other vaccines):

The concept of a vaccination is simple enough: vaccines provoke immunity by exposing individuals either to pathogens that have been weakened or killed so that they can no longer cause full-on disease, or to bits of pathogens. But pathogens are wildly diverse, and a vaccine strategy that works for one disease may not work for others. Some are fairly straightforward—for example, injecting weakened or killed polio virus provides lasting protection. (Since 2000, the United States has used only killed polio virus.) When I was vaccinated as a kid, I likely received the next best thing to a natural infection: live but weakened versions of polio, mumps, and measles. A generation later, most of my children’s shots were filled with inactivated or killed viruses, or bits of microbes.[i] Kids today do still receive some attenuated (weakened) virus vaccines, notably against mumps, measles, and rubella.

Many of these twentieth-century vaccines began with Maurice Hilleman, a virologist and vaccine developer who spent most of his career at Merck Pharmaceutical. The mumps vaccine my kids received may even be traced back to the 1963 mumps virus that once infected Hilleman’s own daughter, Jeryl Lynn. As he tells the story, one night she woke complaining of a sore throat. “Oh my god,” said Hilleman, pointing to the glands under his chin and holding out his hands, “her throat was like this.”Though rare, a mumps infection can have serious complications, from permanent hearing loss to life-threatening brain swelling. There was no vaccine. So Hilleman raced to the lab and grabbed some swabs. Three years later, he treated his one-year-old daughter Kirsten with a vaccine he had developed from Jeryl Lynn’s virus. “Here was a baby being protected by a virus from her sister, and this has been unique in the history of medicine. . . . It was a big human-interest story.”[ii] Hilleman, who passed away in 2005, is credited not only with developing dozens of vaccines but also saving more lives than any scientist before him. But, as the authors of an article in Science about twenty-first-century vaccine development pointed out in 2013, “By the latter part of the twentieth century, most of the vaccines that could be developed by direct mimicry of natural infection with live or killed/inactivated vaccines had been developed.”[iii]In other words, the most manageable pathogens, like mumps, were under control. What’s left for vaccine makers are the problem pathogens…. They are also confronted with a growing trend of distrust in vaccines. Ironically, vaccination critics are part of a population that has benefited greatly from vaccines, largely avoiding the raft of infectious diseases that plagued earlier generations.

Yet no matter how many lives vaccines save, there is no skirting the issue. Vaccination is a medical intervention. We inject newborns and toddlers—the most vulnerable members of society, who cannot decide for themselves. Some parents worry about their kids receiving too many vaccines at once. Others are concerned by the small amounts of toxic chemicals like formaldehyde and ethyl mercury used to kill or to preserve vaccines. Some believe conspiracy theories about vaccines spreading disease. And many have been frightened by a now-discredited study accusing the MMR vaccine (also developed by Hilleman) of causing autism. Some of these concerns contain an unsettling kernel of truth. A portion of the polio vaccines that my generation—millions of children—received were contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40. Until the 1960s, polio vaccine was grown and isolated from green monkey cells. Hilleman and a colleague discovered the virus; a couple of years later, another researcher showed that the virus caused cancerous tumors in hamsters. By the time vaccine makers had replaced monkey-cell cultures with human cell cultures, an estimated 100 million of us baby boomers had been vaccinated. Fifty years later, despite much suspicion and study, the virus has not yet been shown to cause cancer in humans.[iv]…

While there may always be unintended consequences of vaccines, the role they have played (and continue to play) in saving lives over the past century has been huge. Now vaccine makers have the tools to develop increasingly safer vaccines, effective against some of the most obstinate pathogens—and they can do so more rapidly.

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Published by Emily

I am an environmental toxicologist, writer, consultant, and mother of two teens. My focus as a toxicologist is the impact of emerging contaminants on human health and the environment.
Over the past few years, after writing and teaching about the interactions between contaminants and living things, I decided to explore the evolution of detoxification systems. Thinking about what makes a chemical toxic versus essential or benign is fascinating and it may help us understand and predict which industrial use chemicals or synthetics are more likely to be toxic and why. The book Evolution in a Toxic World, is one outcome of this work. I hope it is just the beginning of more to come.
Several years ago I edited the book Motherhood, The Elephant in the Laboratory, something I felt compelled to do after collecting a number of comments and emails sent by women scientists on a AAAS list serve in response to a simple question, "...does anyone out there find combining motherhood and science a challenge?" That work led to a number of interesting panel discussions which I hope will be of some use to scientist moms (and dads, since its really all about work-life balance) at any point in their career.
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